Untapped asset : The $3 Trillion value of US Enterprise documents

Conclusion (in case you felt it was tl;dr): The value of documents – in their creation, access and use – can indeed be measured<p>The information contained within U.S. enterprise documents represents about a third of gross domestic product, or an amount of about $3.3 trillion annually<p>Some 25% of all of these expenditures lend themselves to actionable improvements<p>There are perhaps on the order of 10 billion documents created annually in the U.S.<p>Corporate data doubles every six to eight months; 85% of this data is contained in documents<p>Ninety to 97 percent of enterprises cannot estimate how much they spend on producing documents each year<p>Document creation is about 2-3 times more important – from an embedded cost standpoint – than document handling<p>It costs, on average, $350 to create a ‘typical’ document The total potential benefit from practical improvements in document access and use to the U.S economy is on the order of $800 billion annually, or about 8% of GDP<p>For the 1,000 largest U.S. firms, benefits from these improvements can approach nearly $250 million annually per firm<p>About three-quarters of these benefits arise from not re-creating the intellectual capital already invested in prior document creation<p>Another 25% of the benefits are due to reduced regulatory non-compliance or paperwork, or better competitiveness in obtaining solicited contracts and grants<p>$33 billion is wasted each year in re-finding previously found Web documents<p>Paperwork and regulatory improvements due to documents can save U.S. enterprises $120 billion each year<p>Lack of document access due to Web sprawl costs U.S. enterprises $22 billion each year<p>$8 billion in annual benefits is available due to document improvements for competitive governmental grant and contract solicitations<p>These figures likely severely underestimate the benefits to enterprises from improved competitiveness, a factor not analyzed in this study<p>Documents are now at the point where structured data was at 15 years ago at the nascent emergence of the data warehousing market.<p>Seems like a good opportunity for a start up. If funny b/c at work I'm working on a project to bring all of our information into a search index.

The state of document management at large companies really is pretty abysmal, and many haven't made much in the way of a serious effort to digitize stuff. My dad, retired from a large petrochemical company, still occasionally gets calls from current engineers there asking if he happens to have any documentation of projects he worked on years ago, and in a lot of cases his personal files seem more complete than the company's, which have been hopelessly shuffled and/or lost over the course of several mergers and moves.

An alternate title for this document: "The economic toll of the Microsoft Office monopoly."

<i>The information contained within U.S. enterprise documents represents about a third of gross domestic product, or an amount of about $3.3 trillion annually</i>

<i>It costs, on average, $350 to create a ‘typical’ document</i>

are we talking getting documents from paper =&#62; digital or are we talking doing something with the data in digital documents?

Isn't docs.google.com (now with uploads) is the solution? =))